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Bob Hope, Before He Became The Comedy Establishment

By TODD S. PURDUM

Published: April 20, 2003

HE was not really a singer, but he introduced a handful of standards in a pitch-perfect voice. He was not really a dancer, but held his own as a hoofer with Cagney and Baryshnikov.

He was never nominated for his acting, but presided over more Oscar ceremonies than anyone and was among the top box office draws of his day. He never had a regular television series, but his specials were smash ratings hits, and the creators of ''M*A*S*H'' and ''Gilligan's Island'' cut their teeth as his radio writers. He lent jokes to Franklin D. Roosevelt, played golf with Bill Clinton and entertained the troops in every American war, from Pearl Harbor to the Persian Gulf.

He was born in London the year that the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk -- and on May 29 he will turn 100.

Anyone under 50 may think of him, if at all, as the Vietnam hawk who backed Richard M. Nixon, taunted protesters, twirled a golf club and read from cue cards as he grew gradually more out of touch with the times. His nimble mind is now adrift and his once-restless frame is limited at last to the bedroom of his sprawling estate in Toluca Lake, the Los Angeles neighborhood where he has lived for 65 years.

But Bob Hope ruled the world.

''When you're an innovator, and you get old, people forget that you're an innovator, you know?'' Jay Leno says in ''100 Years of Hope and History,'' a two-hour retrospective to be broadcast tonight on NBC, 53 years to the month after Mr. Hope's television debut on Easter Sunday, 1950. ''And there's a whole generation of people that just remember Bob Hope as 'Didn't he used to do some shows for the soldiers?' And they forget. I mean, he's probably the greatest American entertainer of the 20th century.''

Mr. Hope was always best known for what Time magazine called his ''vibrant averageness.'' As early as 1947, Variety criticized his unwillingness to ''veer an inch from his time-tested routine,'' and concluded: ''Question simply is: Who's going to outlive the other, Hope or the listening public?''

By lasting so long, by taking sides on one of the most divisive political issues of his day and by performing, in his last active years, more or less on autopilot, he helped obscure his own most brilliant work and lost a new generation of audiences. But his comic heirs were paying attention, and in tonight's special, performers from Conan O'Brien to Drew Carey, Mel Brooks and Steve Martin attest to his inspiration.

''I just see an enormous skill and hilarity to his delivery, and his persona, and the character that he developed over the years, and the superbly flippant style that coped with every situation,'' said Woody Allen, who began successfully sending gag lines to Mr. Hope as a teenager. ''To me, he was a guy who was very, very facile with his dialogue, and never, ever at a loss for a very funny remark to make in any situation, no matter how harrowing, or romantic, or downtrodden or exuberant.

Mr. Hope all but invented the role of wisecracking emcee, first in vaudeville, then on radio, at 17 Oscar ceremonies over 38 years, and in 286 television specials, including the first Western entertainment broadcast from China, featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Big Bird, and innumerable personal appearances featuring the top entertainers, athletes and politicians of the moment. In more than 50 films, often with his friend Bing Crosby on the ''Road to Zanzibar'' -- or Morocco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bali or Utopia -- he perfected the role of braggart-coward who seldom got the girl but never stopped trying.

''When I look at some of my movies, some of the early ones especially, I can just see myself 'doing' him unabashedly,'' Mr. Allen added in a recent interview. ''And for people that know me, like Diane Keaton, they can just see it clear as a bell.''

With his rapid-fire delivery, inimitable timing and slightly nasal voice, Mr. Hope insisted, always, on a live audience, so he could punch a monologue up or ratchet it down as he read his listeners' reactions. Mr. O'Brien speaks of the ''backtracking'' style, in which Mr. Hope's film characters' conceits suddenly crumble in perfect deadpans or double takes.

He was the first to sing Ira Gershwin's ''I Can't Get Started,'' Cole Porter's ''DeLovely,'' plus ''Two Sleepy People,'' ''Silver Bells,'' ''Buttons and Bows'' and ''Thanks for the Memory,'' which won the Oscar as best song in his debut film, ''The Big Broadcast of 1938,'' and promptly became his theme song in 59 unbroken years under contract to NBC.

He pierced an era of prudery with a raciness less popular figures could not have dared. On a 1940's radio broadcast, when Dorothy Lamour said she was just pulling his leg, Mr. Hope replied: ''Dottie, you can pull my right leg, and you can pull my left leg, but don't mess with Mr. In-Between!''

Mr. Hope was the first comic to acknowledge that he relied on a stable of writers, and he meticulously cataloged the inventory in 88,000 alphabetized, cross-referenced pages of jokes now in the Library of Congress, along with letters, scrapbooks, medals and an assortment of Hope-iana.